On 27.11.2009, at 06:59, Carl Cravens wrote:
  

Hi there!

I'm a professional developer, and recently discovered Etoys while looking for a language/environment suitable for my 9-year-old son to learn to code in.  (These kids raised on Flash games don't seem to want to write programs with boring text-based interfaces.)  Scratch is really cool, but it quickly became too limiting.  Etoys, while a little less inviting than Scratch, has a lot of power hidden under the hood once you manage to find it.  Many thanks to those who have made it happen... I've been having a lot of fun with it.
    

Great!

  

I've been writing a space-invaders clone
    

Yay! :)

Looks like the "overlaps any" is buggy - there is some offset in the overlap test:

  

 (I can't figure out how to find a handle for the object I've collided with so I can send it a message directly.  That would be useful.)
    

Indeed, that would be useful. But we don't really have collision detection yet. The canonical way is to do color tests.

  

I'm sure I could switch to testing "I'm over color", but I'd like to be able to use more artistic invaders... I don't want them to be a uniform color.  And I could redraw my invaders so that they don't present such a large "opening".  Or I could give the invaders a background color that matches the playfield instead of a transparent background.
    

What if the bullet does a "I'm not over the background" test?

But yes, in general Etoys is set up not to make things pretty but to allow the principles to be applied directly.

  

I'm not sure what the standard is for sharing code... I can post the project if looking at it would be helpful.  Just tell me where and how.
    

You could upload it to the squeakland showcase:

	http://squeakland.org/showcase/

- Bert -